Facebook and Xing see expansion during financial crisis

Interesting but not suprisingly the world of social networking reacts very positively in times of economic turmoil. Have a read of the following article from the Economist. BTW: I'm in China at the moment for a Microsoft HR and Recruitment Immersion tour. Looking forward to learn this week about some of the recruitment challenges that the Chinese market has to offer and how I can bring some of those learning back to the European market... I wonder will any of the Irish job boards stakes in Chinese job boards be mentioned in the McKinsey study we're going to get on the talent market tomorrow. PS- Stay away from duck's tongue but when given the chance to eat duck liver encased in brown caster jelly. Go for it!

M16 using Facebook to recruit!

Looks like her Majesty's British Service is recruiting their next James Bond on Facebook! Check it out here!

This week in recruitment

1. Firms' recruitment falls to 15-year low in London > 2. Indeed expand to India > 3.India's Fastest Growing Online Recruitment Site, Naukri.com, Chooses Akamai to Optimize Performance and Scalability > 4. Is everyone social networking - read what the Synovate survey has to say > 5. LoadzaJobs.ie have 3 week online recruitment fair

Facebook and Careerbuilder join forces

Previously I posted about clever LinkedIn building an API to Facebook's platform and it looks like CareerBuilder are following suit and jumping on the Facebook train. Just in case any of you there out there haven't heard of facebook well shame on you and here is a few stats to peak your interest.

- 4th most trafficked website in the World!
- 80 million active registered users
-Projected to have 200 million users by end of 08
- 45 billion page views per month
-Over 250,000 new active users a day

Here is the link to CareerBuilder's Facebook page and here is another to a clever company page created by Caeerbuilder. Where you can expect Careerbuiler to make it's money will be leveraging the newsfeed functionality in people's profiles for targeting advertisment. Prices are out in the UK and range from a plantnium package for £9k for 1.5 million impressions and a client facebook page to a silver package which is £3k for 500,000 impressions and a client page. For that kind of money maybe worth a try!

What's cool about these options is there is also the ability to purchase some ad space per a number of media options so you can look at what demographic and location you want to target amongst others which allows you control the hit rate a bit better.

To learn more about the partnership and learn about some of Career Builder's aggressive expansion plans read Careerbuilder's CEO, Eric Preseley's interview on CNET.

And not to be out done Monster in the UK also have their own page. Albeit, I haven't heard of any close knit relationship like Careerbuilder's forming yet. Maybe only a matter of time.

Saon Group do it again - but this time in south America

check out the news article here here.

Saongroup.com has expanded its operations to central America with the acquisition of Tecoloco.com. The company operates in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama and plans to open in Costa Rica before Christmas. The company also boasts an impressive client base that is expanding quickly.

The Irish recruiter, which is jointly owned by telecoms entrepreneur Denis O'Brien and Cork businessman Leslie Buckley, is believed to have paid more than $3 million (€2.05 million) to acquire the business although no price was disclosed.

If this spikes the entrepreneur in you what should you do to capitalise on the Latin American jobs board gold rush! Well, if you got some time on your hands and some money to spend and want to follow in the jet stream of Denis and co I'd susggest starting with the language! Learn that Spanish fluency you all dreamed about having. Get over to Central America and start yourself a job board and pay someone to get some clients to use it. Plan your exit to one of the never ending expanding job boards of the world. Career Builder was quite happy to buy 2nd choice and 3rd choice generic job boards all across Europe to expand its global brand. They could be a contender. Likewise Monster has proven that it is prepared to do the same. I reckon if you pick an excellent URL that can rank in organic searches quickly, provide a simple and clean architecture that works and get someone on the ground drumming up some clients with some careful CPC purchases and some consistent blogging you'll have a small business before you know it.

Creo que empersaria en Costa Rica, al menos, las playas son grandes si la empresa fracasa- Hasta pronto!

Irish Saon Group is (IrishJobs.ie) expanding internationally again!

The Irish Saongroup has been flashing the cash again... This time, they've bought MyJob a Mauritian job board. This is hot the heels of last years expansion into In Southern Africa after last year’s acquisition of P-Net.

The island in the Indian Ocean has 1.2 million inhabitants and their economy will be the first country “to become the first nation to have coast-to-coast wireless internet access”...interesting move!

"Scary New Competition for Monster" - Business Week

So there is a debate raging in the US at the moment about whether or not employers are getting screwed over by the good old "pay-to-post" job board model. Is it good enough to pay for a posting and to HOPE that someone will respond to you that fits the bill. Should not the model be pay-for-performance? Enter RealMatch with a brand new model and way of doing things.

Is it time that Monster, IrishJobs, RecruitIreland, JObs,ie and the other take note and beging to give us something new that provides with better matching technology that currently exists. I wonder which one of them will stand up to the test. If RecruitIreland or Jobs.ie can do it and do it well we may have a new big dog in town to usurp IrishJobs off its top mantle here in the Emerald Isle!

Flexible Executives - could this cool idea work in Ireland?

Flexible Executive is an interesting niche agency in Atlanta US that caught my attention this w/end. At its core what it does is connect executives that have family responsibilities e.g. parents who manage from home autistic children, with firms that have specific projects that let them work from home while at the same time allowing them maintain flexibility around work-force balance. I'm not sure if Ireland has a big enough market to support this model but hats off and great idea.

This Week in Recruitment

1. Monster's founder sets sight on Obits, here. 2. Online Recruitment is the best way the credit crunch for employer, here. 3.New recruitment TV show, here! 4. UK meltdown sends Indian students home, here. 5. Recent Google rankings show an annual average of almost 400,000 searches for keywords 'Caribbean jobs", here.

This time Stepstone buy into France

The French job board market seems to be seeing a lot of activity of late. Recently I talked about CareerBuilders entry into the market by purchasing LesJeudis but this time StepStone is taking over the French LVE Group, check out more here.

So now I make it Monster, CareerBuilder, StepStone, Adenclassifieds and Régionsjob in France. Is there room for any more.. definitnely, expect more aquisitions and more consolidation to come.

Zubed - GeoSpatial Jobs are here: This rocks!

This is super cool!
And, super clever!

I was waiting for Google to bring out this system as a marriage between Google Base Jobs and Google Maps but it looks like they didn't think about it, didn't see it as being a big enough priority or were simply bet to the post by Zubed.

Zubed is an online mapping system that matches employers with job seekers for permanent and contract jobs for free, for both parties. However, recruitment agencies can not use the system and are politely asked to stay away!It has a simple messaging system in place, allows advanced search and has some networking functionality set up.

Career Builder enters the French Market with a Bang!

Also worth taking note of is Career Builder's recent announcement that it is entering into the French market with the purchase of the LesJeudis group which includes a prestigious IT job board and also ingenieur-emplois.com, Erecrut, Phonemploi, RecruLex and CAOemplois. The group also has their fingers further in the employment pie in France with such portfolio prducts as: proposes candidate management solutions via Profilsoft employment faris and job search engines. It looks like CareerBuilders expansion outside the US is picking up some series velocity to challenge Monster's hegemony and the strong growth of Total Jobs on a global context.

Here's what Yasin Farhan, President of the International Careerbuilder Group said o the employees of the newly acquired company via email.

I am excited to announce that CareerBuilder is continuing its international expansion with the acquisition of Lesjeudis.com, the leading independent online job site in France. Lesjeudis operates six different recruitment Web sites in France focused on various employment segments and is one of the most widely recognized IT job sites in France. The company is also a leader in job fairs in France. The Lesjeudis brand, coupled with MSN’s enormous internet penetration in France (more than 20 million visitors in May to MSN sites in France), positions CareerBuilder for long term success in the French marketplace.

As a leading economy in Europe, France will play a key role in CareerBuilder’s international expansion. This acquisition adds hundreds of thousands of new job seekers and many of France’s leading employers to CareerBuilder’s international network.

I would like to welcome Cedric Barbier, the founder of Lesjeudis and his team to CareerBuilder. Cedric has built a great organization, consistent with CareerBuilder’s culture and values, and we are thrilled he chose CareerBuilder as the home for his organization. Lesjeudis will retain the well-recognized brand that Cedric and his team have built over the last 10 years and Cedric will continue to lead the company.

This acquisition, combined with our recent launches in Italy, Belgium, Norway and Romania, are significant steps towards achieving our mission of being the global leader in online recruitment.

Read more here: 1, 2, .

LinkedIn to go IP0 in 2009.

Who said there wasn't money to be made in Social Networks, read here, and here. With the company projected to make 100m US dollars in revenue this year they've come a long way. Despite having many exit opportunities from a large number of suiters...of which I would imagine Monster was one... it will be interesting to see if LinkedIn opens its platform to developers and how if it does so it will change their offerings to the now 23 million people with profiles on the site.

The new public profile url builder in LinkedIn and cool new French Recruitment Software

I just changed my public profile URL in LinkedIn to: http://www.linkedin.com/in/irishjobs - you can see that i now have the words Irish and Jobs in the profile. This is pretty neat as you can take high real estate words on the web and apply them to a web address on your profile which will increase the chances of organic search queries by the public driving eye balls to your LinkedIn profile where you can be advertising your current open reqs!

Also, the French jobs search engine Moovement has recently launched the software Job Board which allows a company create its own HR and recruitment site for a small monthly fee.

Announcement: New Job!

I'm glad to report that I have got a little promotion in Microsoft and now I am a global sourcing manager working on some interesting new challenges we have in supporting the business to make the move to a more distributive development strategy. In doing so I will be spreading the net to learn more about our strategic development centres and hot r-e-g-o-s which is where we think we should be sourcing talent from. This will be more travel, which I sincerely hope won't be too much, as I don't like missing my runs in Phoenix Park in the heart of Dublin or my weekly game of football with the lads, but, it will give me a change to learn more about global sourcing which I am delighted about. Top on my list of things I'm going to try learn are:

-How to write search strings on Google, Live and Baidu in Cantonese and Mandrin
-What are the top technical recruitment agencies to use in Israel and perfect writing Hebrew strings from right to left
-How to run sourcing blitzes in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad in India
-How to run competitive research programs in Scandanavian

Amazing the journey's one can go on from a little room in Ireland. Should be fun!

This week in recruitment

1. Scary, US Armey get more creative on their recruitment brand. 2. Top Japanese job boards. 3. Are you looking for a job in oil? 4. A third of Irish workers wouldn't apply for their current job. 5. Executive recruitment in France now arriving in 2nd Life.

Is this the best job in Europe?

CV Videos revisited

OK - We're all well versed about Video CVs at this stage... and God knows I've seen a few in my day. But for those of you who haven't caught up with the marketplace to get up to speed check out sites like: www.lookfirst.net, www.talkingcv.com, www.visualcv.com and tecopeople.com. And also check out some of my previous posts on the subject in the categories section to the right.

To add to the sites already out there an Irish company called www.CVizz.com and has got in the game. Started last year as an Enterprise Ireland high-potential start up it links graduates and employers in a innovative medium that is only going to get stronger in the years ahead. Hats off to Marie Carroll, CEO of CVizz and I wish her and the company every success in the future.

Matching technology has arrived but still has along way to go

When will the job boards be competed against with a disruptive technology. Will Google or Microsoft get into the job market some day? Probably not for some time! They have bigger fish to fry for the moment. But there are a lot of other recruitment minds thinking about how they can leap frog the job boards. one company that has caught my eye of late is Real Match.com. This is the first technology that replaces keywrod searching with a profile-matching model that has a cool proprietary algorithms to match candidates with recruiters behind it.

What I like about this technology is it is the first proper "matching" technology that I have seen and the first step towards my predictions around how XML may help change the way we recruit in the future in the screenplay I wrote called the "Flat CV" back in 2005. The technology also offers real time search results that grade and ilter candidates according to how well a profile matches an employers JD profile.

Seems like we have a company who is truely embrassing the concept of quality not quantity which is refreshing!

Xing spreads its wings

Interesting to see Neurona being taken over. Expect more consolidation to come from Open BC.Read here.

Tip: Use the new LinkedIn app to place your jobs on Facebook

LinkedIn as well as changing its UI recently, also very interestingly did a Facebook on Google move :) by creating a Facebook application of its own that allows LinkedIn users place there jobs on Facebook. Clever.

In my opinion this is a clear first mover play to protect the potential threat of Facebook launching similar functionality to it's own site that take people away from LinkedIn.

Simply called "My Company's Hiring", the app is very basic and though it is branded with the LinkedIn logo, it has absolutely no connection with LinkedIn or your profile on LinkedIn. Quite simply it is a way to post what jobs are open at your company, into your Facebook profile.

To put it into use you simply turn on the application, fill out your company's name, location and position details and where people can get more info.
Simply activate the application, and fill out the company's name, location, the positions you are hiring people for, a description, and if needed, a link for where people can get more information from.

YouTube meets IrishJobs.ie

Corporate adoption of social media to both recruit and retain is becoming very popular in the US at the moment and this phenomenon is beginning to seep into Irish waters as well. This week i had the chance to look at two sites which are leading the charge around video recruiting: VideoJobShop and CareerTV.

In Microsoft Ireland we've been playing with the concept of social recruitment for quite some time and it works. I'm not privy to share any juicy stats on how it works but trust me when I say that the time investment has been worth while. What has worked quite well from a branding point has been a blog I've been running for over a year called Microsoft International Tech Jobs. What has pleasantly surprised me with the site is the number of people who subscribe to the rss feeds and the percentage of visitors that come to the site from organic search listings purely because of the carefully chosen keywords I use in the title or article main page that the search engines indexed. What also is worth noting is the videos themselves also can have a hit count which allows you understand what videos were visited the most or the least and as such can give you some ideas of what to do better to fine tune your content, subject matter and directorial approach.

What we are begining to see is the creation of a new type of recruiter in the HR/Recruitment team of large corporations. Let's call it the social recruitment marketeer. This persons's job is to design and build content for your recruitment brand. To research and locate high-traffic locations where your target audience exists and design sounds bites, video bites or text bites to try lure your target markets attention. This individual also needs to be technically astute and must be prepared to learn new technologies, tinker and play with them and then draw some conclusions about how these can be used to improve your company's sourcing strategies. Whether it be forming a group on Facebook, learning how to write search in iTunes podcast directory, how to optimise your web site for higher visibility or how to automate searches on the web. There is a lot happening out their that needs attention. Those who want to professional cybersleuths and reap the benefits of social computing need to understand that there is a need for an up front investment in resources to get this right. And there is a need to let people test and play with these technologies in order for them to find out what will and will not work for you.

LinkedIn, Sushi and iPhones

Cool! So today I found myelf in a sushi restaurent with a wi-fi connection. Nice combination. Tempura and broadband. Life could be worse I thought to myself as I picked up some sashimi with my brittle chopsticks. To make the evening even more interesting I found my first c++ engineer on my iPhone using LinkedIn... oh how these times are changing :)

Build your own recruitment web site.

The best of a new bunch appearing for me is Stand Our Jobs - it's easily customisable and i incorporates a lot of what is good about web 2.O.

Blue Card will hurt the US

It's very interesting, and testemant to the pain US employers are experiencing that the Chairman of Intel penned this piece about the ultra competive Blue Card system being proposed by the EU member countries to attract quality employees into the region. Read here.

Microsoft using Facebook to Recruit

As you know we here in Microsoft do our humble best to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to trying to recruit quality staff. The latest concept we have been toying with in the US has been how we use Facebook to try recruit. As most of you know by now recruitment isn't all about clever tools, tricks, and marketing experiments it's more about a good old fashion dolp of well written, informative and catchy job descriptions, an efficient and focused sourcing campaign and roll up your sleeve tenacity. But that aside, it is important to try new techniques to market in. LinkedIn being a very good example of why. Every so often you can find a tool that hits your bottom line with some direct hires as we've experienced here and you can learn invaluable market information about your targeted hires.

But what about ubiquitous Facebook as a recruitment tool? For me the jury is still very much out! So far it hasn't won me over and I haven't heard too many companies making hires from it yet. But that said there is a lot of experimenting going on. Check out some of the work Ernest & Young has been doing on the graduate front. Also CareerBuilder.uk and GulfTalent.com are now offering a jobs matching service on Facebook. GulfTalent going as far to build, as far as I know, the first recruitment application geared to recruit from the social platform. We haven't invested heavily in marketing on it yet but we are paying it attention. To not pay attention would be haphazard. The numbers are simply too hard to ignore. With its magnanimous rise to power Facebook is clearly becoming the front running global social platform. What we've decided to do it create out own group to do some of our own testing. You can check it out here. The real interesting part for me is the advanced search facilities in facebook and the new apps that are beginning to appear. Not so much the group sections. If they begin to develop and the meteor rise of users keeps growing then the people you are searching for may have a profile and you may be able to find them. To do this as it stand will be hard because of the prevailing attitude on it that it is more a social tool to interact with friends and family and look up old class mates you went on the J1 to Montauk but have since dropped off the radar. The simple truth of the natter is not many people are putting up their professional profiles and until that happens its effectiveness will be circumscibed from a recrutitnt point of view. Time will tell. I'll keep an eye on it and report back to you all.

Will 2008 mark a slow down in jobs

Irish job gloom ahead?

New Sourcers Network

It's been a very relaxing Christmas with lots of swimming, food, films and fun!

I'm now looking already to 2008 and one thing I have decided to do for the year is slowly work at bringing the community of Irish recruiters out there with a passion for sourcing closer together. Hopefuuly, let's see. These type of things are notoriusly hard to do when you ahve 15 reqs open! :) In a humble attempt I've set up Ireland's first sourcing society [which one of my close colleagues has joint yet. She knows who she is :)! ]. To join the society you will have to go to http://irishrecruiters.ning.com/ and answer some of the simple questions at the start to register. If joining please put a photo at least an avator if you are to shy to put your own picture. The network hopefully will be a great place to learn more about sourcing and will facilitate and questions and answers forum for people to ask their questions which hopefully the community will comment on. On this social network I will also write the occassional blog entry... so if you liked some of the articles switch over if you want to keep reading.

Search Engine Wiki

I've been waiting for this one to come along and finally it is here. The international search engine list is very cool!

Also, worth checking out is a site called www.joinmicrosofteurope.com I have been working on and a new blog that is perfoirming really well for me and is loads of fun brining me all over the world with my trusty camera called. The Microsoft Internationl Core Tech blog!

The world of social network referrals

I talked about H3.com anumber of months ago as a system to refer your friends for a job and win a bonus from a company from doing so. Well now there is another site something similar this time from the UK called, Zubka doing the same. It's worth investigating a little more to see if your company could use it.